Amazon Web Services Outage Cuts Off Big Names

Amazon.com’s Web services unit had a glitch Sunday that appeared to take down some prominent websites and apps, including Airbnb, Facebook’s Instagram and Twitter’s Vine video service, according to notices the companies posted to Twitter.

Getty

“We know many of you are having trouble loading Instagram. We identified the issue and are working to fix it ASAP,” posted Instagram on its Twitter feed. (Instagram has previously disclosed that it uses Amazon Web Services, also known as AWS.)

The outage also hit smaller sites. “We are unable to add or edit content to our websites as a result of the Amazon AWS outage,” Maine’s Kennebec Journal tweeted Sunday at 4:21 p.m. Pacific time. It noted about an hour and a half later that service had returned to normal.

Amazon advertises that its outsourced Web services are more reliable than companies running their own computer servers.

But because Amazon is the cloud and computing backbone behind so many sites, outages — however brief — attract plenty of attention, particularly on social media.

Amazon noted on its AWS service health site earlier Sunday that it had found issues with something called Elastic Block Store, a storage service. The company said full service had been restored just before 6 pm Pacific time.

Amazon’s main retail earlier this week also was inoperable for a less than an hour for many customers. Amazon didn’t offer an explanation for the outage.

Representatives for Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.